Pratham Books

Research shows learning to read in mother tongue languages reduces dropout rates and makes education engaging and meaningful for children yet UNESCO reports that 40% of the global population lack access to education in a language they know. In the multi-ethnic countries of the Global South, millions of children are unable to read or learn effectively due to critical shortages of quality local language reading resources.
StoryWeaver from Pratham Books addresses the book gap by providing an open repository of quality storybooks in multiple languages to promote reading acquisition among children. Simple tools embedded on the platform allow users to further translate and version books for localized requirements and publish these resources on StoryWeaver, creating a multiplier effect and amplifying impact. This has led to a massive increase of local language books on the platform with 65000 books available in over 370 languages, which have been read over 200 million times in 150 countries. Of these, 58% are in minority and indigenous languages, where books are scarce or non-existent and where children have often read a book in their own languages for the first time. This kind of scale has been possible through our communities of practice model. Nurturing these communities lets us distribute our ability to solve for literacy through a societal platform.
While the platform is digital, the books are available in multiple formats to overcome the issue of digital access and can be read online, offline or downloaded and printed. StoryWeaver is recognised as a Digital Public Good by the Digital Public Goods Alliance as India's first vetted digital public good for early reading.
StoryWeaver is built on Rails, a web application framework with its front-end on ReactJS. The third-party libraries we use are also open source. During 2018, when Room to Read adopted White Labeled code version of StoryWeaver, we open sourced that version of the code base under the MIT license.